OS X Leopard 10.5.6
External drive is Journaled & Extended.

There is a folder on an external drive with photos, txt files, zips, etc. I used the search (COMMAND-F) on it hundreds of times, and once I started typing, the items would of course become listed. Now, it seems nothing can be found. Even things I KNOW are there. I have used various parameters, from shotgun approach to detailed, and nothing.
Funny thing is, I have copied this folder to my iMac HD, and the searching works fine.

Disk Utility reports the External HD is fine.

What gives? Thanks in advance!

You may want to have Spotlight re-index the drive. Go to System Preferences>Spotlight and select Privacy. Drag the hard drive icon into the Privacy pane and drop it there. Then, select it and click - to remove it from Privacy. Within a few moments, Spotlight will commence re-indexing the drive.

This often cures problems such as yours.

jchuzi!! That did the trick. I guess I should so this from time to time with all HDs?

Thank you.

I don't know that that you need to do this as a general maintenance procedure. It doesn't hurt if you don't mind the time for re-indexing but my take is that you should only do it when and if it becomes necessary.

I've been trying to do this with an external drive that is (always) connected to our OS X Server machine (a Mac Pro) but the external simply won't get re-indexed. I do what you suggest, but Spotlight doesn't kick in and start indexing. However, when I plug in another HD that we use for moving large files, Spotlight steps right up and tries to index it.

Might you have another tip as to how to re-index an external drive?

If you're not averse to using Terminal, you can erase existing indexes, turn indexing on and off, and more by using the mdutil command.

To make sure the external volume in question is indeed set to index its contents, enter

mdutil -s /Volumes/Volume_Name

and hit Return.

To turn indexing on if the previous command reports that it's disabled, enter

sudo mdutil -i on /Volumes/Volume_Name

and hit Return. Terminal will request an administrator password; enter it (nothing will be displayed) and hit Return.

If all goes well, the Terminal response will be

/Volumes/Volume_Name:
Indexing enabled.

Is that external formatted as an HFS+ volume? [aka "Mac OS Extended"]
Or is it some FAT32 job? I think Spotlight still requires HFS+.